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Mike Lewis
Programmer
Many of you Office experts probably already know this, but it is new to me, and it might be new to some of you as well.
When designing the layout of a document in Word, it's often useful to fill it with text. It doesn't matter what the text is. You just want some words to be in place so that you can judge the layout, fonts, colours and so on. In the past, I've copied and pasted whatever text happens to be handy at the moment. It might be from another document, or from a website, or whatever.
It turns out that there is an easier way. Just type the following into the document, then hit Enter:
[tt]=rand(p,s[/tt])
where p is the number of paragraphs you want, and s is the number of sentences per paragraph. For example:
[tt]=rand(6,4)[/tt]
will give you six paras with four sentences per para.
When you hit Enter, the specified amount of text will appear at the insertion point. As far as I can make out, the text comes from an Office Help file, but you don't need to know that.
Graphical designers traditionally use so-called Lorem Ipsum text for this purpose. If that's what you want, you can type this:
[tt]
=lorem(p,s)[/tt]
where, again, p and s represent the number of paragraphs and sentences respectively.
If nothing else, this is a good illustration of the fact that, however well you think you know some software, there is always something new to learn. I've been using Microsoft Word for around 30 years, but I never knew this feature existed.
Mike
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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads
When designing the layout of a document in Word, it's often useful to fill it with text. It doesn't matter what the text is. You just want some words to be in place so that you can judge the layout, fonts, colours and so on. In the past, I've copied and pasted whatever text happens to be handy at the moment. It might be from another document, or from a website, or whatever.
It turns out that there is an easier way. Just type the following into the document, then hit Enter:
[tt]=rand(p,s[/tt])
where p is the number of paragraphs you want, and s is the number of sentences per paragraph. For example:
[tt]=rand(6,4)[/tt]
will give you six paras with four sentences per para.
When you hit Enter, the specified amount of text will appear at the insertion point. As far as I can make out, the text comes from an Office Help file, but you don't need to know that.
Graphical designers traditionally use so-called Lorem Ipsum text for this purpose. If that's what you want, you can type this:
[tt]
=lorem(p,s)[/tt]
where, again, p and s represent the number of paragraphs and sentences respectively.
If nothing else, this is a good illustration of the fact that, however well you think you know some software, there is always something new to learn. I've been using Microsoft Word for around 30 years, but I never knew this feature existed.
Mike
__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)
Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads
